


The Call Of Destiny

by orphan_account



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: A pretentious little fic, AU, Action, Adventure, Angst, Arthur comes back, Eventual relationship, Fluff, I suck at tags, I'm afraid this will end up looking like supernatural, M/M, Merthur - Freeform, Romance, This is basically an attempt at a series 6 of merlin, chapter fic that i'll update depending on the reaction I'll receive about it, everything, i mean if y'all like it, modern days, oopsie, resurrection fic, slow build relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 04:53:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8876740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: This fic is an attempt at giving us all what we deserve, which is a season 6 of BBC Merlin.Everything you need to know is in the tags. [..]He sighed, he certainly wasn't rich. For how much money one person can make, it has to be a lot to last a lifetime, and it has to be a lot more than a lot to last an indefinite number of lifetimes.He inhaled noisily and that inevitably brought his attention back to the mirror.Young again. For no apparent reason. Right.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! My name is Laura, and I'm extremely excited to start this project. I hope it'll bring me some friends in this community, some people to share my thoughts, passions and works with.  
> I'm saying this now so I won't bother you again: I'm extremely insecure, and if I feel that something I'm doing isn't being liked, I'll lose faith in it and I'll eventually stop. So I'd like you, if you want and if you appreciate my work, to comment. They don't necessarily have to be nice comments, I accept critiques too, but I'd like to know what you all think.  
> Thank you really much for reading and enjoy :)

"Well. Here I was, thinking it would be just another Tuesday."  
He brought a skinny hand to his smooth, hairless right cheek. He was used to it being covered in a cascade of thick, exaggeratedly long white hair, and he frankly had come to like the way it made him look eternal and wise. But mainly it was the 'smooth' part that made his face so unrecognizable he shot an enchantment to the mirror thinking it was an intruder, and shattered it into the sink.  
After he screamed, came to his senses, hurriedly fixed his mirror, lost his senses, screamed a little bit more and almost knocked himself out to not shatter the mirror again, he came to an halt, breathing heavily, and a shaky, pale, young -young!- hand came up to his face and began stroking it.  
It would have been a reasonable hell of double fried weird with extra freaky if the man waking up with a baby-clean shaven face, sparkly juvenile eyes surrounded by no wrinkles whatsoever and no trace of senile pains had just been Oliver Smok; a centenary nobody owner of a picturesque magic shop, well known by his acquaintances for apparently everybody's ignorance of his effective age and his bizarrely, (admirably, if you asked him), potentially unsanitarily long beard.  
But just how deep fried would the weird be if the man hadn't seen the features of his own face lingering under the intricate map of wrinkles and scars for millenniums?  
Oh, and even weirder, may one add, be known that the man that had been gaping at his own reflection for some impressive ten minutes - given the fact that he didn't even bother to close his mouth, thus now suffering of a slight paralysis of his jaw - was none less than the legendary sorcerer, the essence of magic itself and the first thing that came to the mind of most people when it was mentioned, but mainly, in this particular context, believed dead a handful of centuries ago, if not entirely a legend.  
That meant said legend was now legendarily screwed, because what was he supposed to do? He knew destiny had a sadistic way of playing with his existence, and just when he thought he had gotten the hang of it, there he was, approximately a zillion years younger, for reasons.  
He huffed as his knees gave in the littlest bit, and he gripped the sink hard to not lose balance. He was surprisingly much more worried about his identity than the implications of suddenly being violently thrown back the vicious tornado of destiny face first, said face being the one of almost a child. Perhaps because he was way worse with social interactions and matters in general than with whatever regarded magic and everything surrounding it.  
He would have to kill himself, obviously.  
Well, not kill kill, and not himself himself, but he surely would have to hold a funeral for the beloved Mr. Smok and also say he was some kind of long lost nephew. Heh, he thought, surely there was a resemblance. He was quite sorry because he would really have loved to watch the youngsters betting on his date and promptly losing, over and over, and then getting married then old then dying and no, he decided. He would have definitely not loved it.  
He would also have to rebuy an entire wardrobe, because the few items of clothing he owned were of an old fashion, to not make an old man stand out too much in the crowd, and the ones who weren't old were ancient, and certainly not appropriate at all.  
He sighed, he certainly wasn't rich. For how much money one person can make, it has to be a lot to last a lifetime, and it has to be a lot more than a lot to last an indefinite number of lifetimes.  
He inhaled noisily and that inevitably brought his attention back to the mirror.  
Young again. For no apparent reason. Right.  
He really, really would have loved advice from an old, wise someone. The thought lasted about the few fractions of second that took him to be reminded that he was the longest living sorcerer if not the longest living human if not the longest living thing, and there were only this many excuses he could make up for not being an old and wise someone.  
"Okay, okay, don't panic. First things first." He muttered, shakily, squeezing a disproportionate amount of toothpaste on his toothbrush and shoving it into his mouth. He would deal with this precisely and neatly, because situations that messed up needed to be split and handled piece by piece, with tranquility and serenity and --  
"Merlin.."  
A voice. Damned voices. He would have immediately checked for someone standing outside the window if he wasn't too busy spitting what he had into his mouth, toothbrush and all, splattering it onto the mirror. It stuck for a moment thanks to the toothpaste, then clanged into the sink.  
He held his terrified panting for as long as he could, trying to hear something, anything, but the voice seemed to have not come from anywhere except for the inside of his skull.  
"Ha! Gotcha!" He yelled, a bit hysterically, as he gripped the sink once again and shoved himself forward with such vehemence the options were he shattered the mirror with his nose or he jumped directly inside it.  
"It was long due. You finally did it, mate. You managed to go completely nuts. Congratulations!"  
He tried to maintain control, as he half-heartedly scraped the toothpaste off his mirror with the only result of smearing it everywhere.  
Severe hallucinations: check.  
Voices: check.  
Talking to himself: well, he had been doing it for centuries, but still, check.  
He honestly wasn't the littlest bit surprised, and he didn't have a reason to be. He knew it was bound to happen someday, he just didn't expect it to be so unsettling.  
He emptied his mind, coming to the conclusion it was the only reasonable solution if he wanted to complete even the simplest of tasks. So he managed to finish brushing his teeth, proceeded to wash his face and dig through his closet looking for something that was even vaguely decent enough to be worn in public as a twenty-ish year old young man, then, once he was done storming and crashing and getting caught in everywhere in house, he stood for a minute in front of his door, panting slightly, one hand on the handle and the other fidgeting with his keys.  
He really needed to take care of the current situation, but he also needed to make sure he wasn't completely insane before doing anything, so he decided to keep going like it was a day like another. He would have a very literal eternity to fix the situation anyway.  
Well, not quite correctly. He had been turned young again, whatever the reason was, so he had eternity square, and that was more than enough time to deal with things.

~~~

His keys twinkled under the sunlight as he fumbled and finally got them to fit into the lock. He grunted as he bent to lift the shutter and then grunted again, but more high-pitchedly, because he was expecting the usual stab of pain in his lower back but nothing happened at all. He lifted it in one swift movement, which had honestly never happened, and then fumbled a bit more with the keys to get in the shop.  
His centenary magic shop.  
Well, to be correct, Oliver Smok's centenary magic shop, but it's not correctness that we're about.  
He had owned it for more years than he bothered to remember and never quite restructured it or even changed its interior. He noticed that people of all sorts of periods had a liking for ancient fashion, especially in that kind of shops.  
Running a not particularly proficient magic shop for the master and essence of magic itself may have looked like a downgrade, but it was one of the best opportunities he had. After Arthur's death, the magic surrounding him started dying, slowly enough for him to only come aware of it when it was too late to look for the reason, let alone fix it. It was like being connected with the earth, the very pulsating core of earth itself, of the soul in every being, and slowly feeling it fade away, feeling the perspective switch, together with the amount and weight of the power, and he found himself bearing on his shoulders all of the magic that ever existed. It didn't feel good nor bad, it didn't even feel weird.. he just knew it. It was not something he needed to communicate with, because it was part of him, and he felt it just like a limb. A very large, swollen, powerful, but increasingly useless limb.  
Together with the magic of the earth, obviously, magical creatures and plants and rocks started disappearing or losing their power. The last time he encountered a creature, Gwen still sat on the throne of Camelot.  
So, as soon as magic stopped being a threat and started bleeding into legend, it became firstly venerated, then accepted, then some sort of joke. People liked to screw he fundaments of the earth and life itself over because they thought it was all a big invention, and it would have had no impact, nor true result. And why would they think the contrary? Magic was dead, after all.  
And that's why he decided to open a small emporium of knowledge and mysteries, but more than that a place - the only - where magic could float around freely and lazily, sparkling placidly together with the sunshine over the thousands and thousands of bizarre glass jars.  
It was not like he sold true magic. Most of the time he fooled people, because they obviously didn't believe and he could not bother to bring them to, so he sold them items that were really pretty, but with the magical potential of a broken toaster, and it was probably definable as a fraud, but they didn't expect them to work in the first place. Love potions, lucky charms, voodoo, they came and bought all sorts of things not knowing that they were buying them from magic Himself, and not caring that they had just been into the cavity of the throbbing, living heart of magic, the only place where it had a chance of being spread to every inch of the world like warm, vital blood.  
Of course, there were exceptions. There were little kids coming in with shimmering eyes and pure souls, a tremor of reverent faith in their chubby hands, a daring spark of hope when he enchanted an amulet to heal their sick puppy, to help their papa find a job. There were adults with no other option left, people asking for a miracle more than a work of magic and Merlin was able to read them, see how much they needed it, and damn it, he hadn't lost that part of himself over time, the unexperienced youngster, too eager to help anyone in need and too trusting of the potential good in people's hearts for his own good.  
He was so busy snickering at his own innocence that he didn't notice the girl slipping noiselessly into the shop until she softly cleared her throat and spoke, sweetly: "Excuse me."  
He jumped a bit and pathetically tried to play it off, pretending to have to fix one of the jars in front of his eyes with extreme urgency.  
"May I help you?" He replied, cheerful. It was how their usual conversation went by. An old man and a kind, nice girl that worked in her parents' pastry shop next to his.  
Except that. Uh, right.  
"Not to be impolite, but who are you?"  
He was about to tell her that she wouldn't manage being impolite even if she lobbed an entire wedding cake onto his head and dragged him forcefully into an insect breeding farm, but that would have implied that he knew her and she knew him, and well, no, she didn't. She knew Oliver Smok.  
"Uh, my name is-"  
He didn't get to finish his sentence, at least not how he wanted to. He would have really liked to make up another pseudonym, another false identity, but there was a voice, that voice again, that called him by his name and he found himself repeating it in unison with it like a total dumbass.  
"Merlin? Like that Merlin?"  
He coughed, reasonably unsettled, and blinked a few times to come back from the shock.  
"Yeah, uh. I bet it's not hard to believe we're a family of fanatics." He giggled uncomfortably.  
"We?"  
Yes, pleasantries, damn. He kept forgetting she wasn't supposed to know him.  
"Right. I should have introduced myself, I'm sorry. Silly me! I'm Merlin Smok, Oliver's.. grandson."  
Sally's face brightened, and the cheerful pair of dimples under her eyes bloomed like a warm welcoming.  
"Well, hi, Merlin! Welcome to town, I guess, because I've never seen you around. I'm Sally, I work in the pastry shop right outside this one and live above it. You can come whenever you want for a cupcake, your grandfather has always been extremely nice to us and has helped us in lots of ways, so you're super welcome, what you want, all you want! It's on the house. If you have a spare minute, I'd like you to come and say hi to my parents. They'd love to know you!"  
Merlin looked at her as she talked. She came from a modest family, yet one of the most respected in town, or better say loved, because of their never ending kindness. She had been brought up with not the slightest ounce of selfishness. Her whole family and her were the most generous, lovable, selfless people that town had ever known, even with all the subtle but still hurtful racism they had been subjected to the first years after they had settled there. In some ways, she reminded him of Guinevere. Strong willed, kind and sweet, and his heart clenched a little. But she was nothing like her in so many others. She was naive to the extremes, dangerously trusting, and her being sure of the goodness in people more often than not led her to the worst decisions. She wasn't strategical like Gwen, she didn't have her ability to ponder and act for what was truly best, she had an incredibly good heart and she blindly followed it around, trying to please everyone, often not thinking of the true consequences.  
He, well, Oliver, did everything in his power to shelter her from the harsh cruelty of a world so heartless that even the knowledge of it being like that would have been enough to destroy her. He protected her like a flightless bird, and he was intending to keep doing so. Maybe it was not the best thing to do, but screw that, he was just as dumbly loving as she was.  
"Merlin.."  
That voice again. He winced visibly, petrified, and then recomposed himself in a heartbeat.  
"I would love it, Sally! Thank you really much for your kindness."  
She fidgeted a little with the prune muffin she used to bring him every morning. He never said anything about liking prunes, they just assumed he did because he was old and he never dared to correct them, so he just grew to liking prunes instead.  
"I, uh, came to give this to your grandpa. Where is he? Is everything okay? He would never leave his little shop."  
He was about to start building his alibi, and really, the word 'dead' had almost slipped from his idiotically tactless lips when he remembered exactly who he was to Sally. He was a fatherlike figure, not because she needed another but because she wanted him to be, and she loved him just like a grandfather. He couldn't do this to her.  
"Uhm, he's.. sick--" he saw her eyes widen in terror.  
"Sick! Oh my god, it isn't too bad, is it?"  
"Oh, er, no, not at all! In fact, he's just a bit overdramatic. It's a cold, is all. But he likes to use the I-don't-know-for-how-long-I'll-be-on-this-earth excuse on my conscience to push me into 'learning the family business'."  
She blinked at him, clearly thinking about the news.  
"Didn't you say yours is a family of fanatics? Shouldn't you already know the job by now?"  
He googled, momentarily at loss of words. That was Sally. Her being trusting didn't mean she was dumb. She was clever enough to be inquisitive but so kind she only did that with sincere curiosity, never once doubting that the words of her interlocutor were true.  
"You know how grandfathers are, they want you to be flawless in what you do, especially if it regards family stuff."  
She gave him a dimply smile and laughed politely.  
"Oh, I get that. Speaking of grandparents, or more generally family, mine is waiting for me. I promised to help my brother with the dough because he always manages to twist it into something sickeningly sweet."  
He cackled, trying not to give away the fact that he knew his brother's culinary fuckups way better than he was supposed to and walked her to the door, waving goodbye as he watched her leave.  
When the door was shut again, he turned to look at his little, bizarre shop, its renewed but never ending emptiness echoing on the wooden walls. He sighed as he flopped down in the creaky chair, deflating on the wooden desk like those old balloons that kids don't know if they're sadder to watch getting crinklier and crinklier or to just pop.  
He sighed, tiredly, puffing his lips out. His forehead rested on his left forearm, while his right fingers curled around a cold metal disk resting in his pocket.  
It was the only remain of his heart the way it was in Camelot, the only material thing to hold on to that Arthur left him: the sigil that belonged to his mother. He could feel the power of Arthur's affection reverberate through all of those centuries, tickling his palm. It was really hard to cry, when he had been doing nothing but that for centuries, and the hurt was too far away. It was more like an hug from a ghost, the feeling of something missing very clear, like a hole throbbing in his chest. But something you don't have isn't something that can't hurt you, you don't feel it. It's like losing a leg, one learns to live without it.. but he had had centuries of practice for that and yet he was just now beginning to see that his left leg was missing.  
So the point of his messy tangle of thoughts didn't exist, because he didn't actually know why he couldn't cry, he was drained to the point of exasperation, maybe, but the more he thought of Arthur, the emptier and purposeless he felt.  
Arthur, with his halo of golden hair, with the lake of Avalon inside him, inside of his vibrant blue eyes.  
Arthur, with his dumbness and a skull as thick as his skin, with bones made up of courage and bravery, and with the thread of his destiny still pulling hard on Merlin's pinky.  
He missed his friend, missed his company, and even though his memory had faded horribly, he could still miss the feeling of Arthur surrounding his heart, sinking his golden, warm roots right in the core of it.  
He missed Arthur, missed his king, missed his friend, missed his heart.  
He had been cradling the sigil in his hand for so long it was getting so warm it was almost hot.  
"Merlin."  
He jumped.  
Again, that voice. It was tainted with laughter, with enthusiasm. A cheerful, detestable, nasal little voice, expectant, he didn't know of what.  
"It's time, Merlin!"  
He gripped the sides of his head, gritting his teeth, murmuring to himself: "Stop it, stop this, if you wanna go mad, please do it in any other way."  
The little voice giggled again. It was a long string of laughter, childish and obtuse, so strained he couldn't believe it was the one of a human being.  
"You're not going insane! I'm not inside your head. Look around!".  
Merlin lifted his head, scanning the room with feverish movements of his irises, and the voice laughed at him again, noisily and heartfelt.  
"I'm not in there, silly. I was just making fun of you."  
Merlin's head banged back on the desk, then thought about it, lifted it and banged it a few more times.  
"Stop hurting yourself!" The little voice exclaimed, "There's only the two of us yet."  
Merlin lifted his head slightly in confusion. His forehead was red from the hits.  
"What does it mean?"  
"Can't you feel it? I'm starting to think I overestimated you."  
His eyes widened. Deep inside his soul, where the magic had been sealed and protected for centuries, a minuscule, almost imperceptible twinkle had escaped. There was a small gash in the tissue of destiny, apparently, but that marked it. Magic had been lethargic, not dead.  
And it had began to awoke.  
"Who are you?", his voice trembled, "I thought I was the only sorcerer left."  
Another resounding laughter. If the voice had sounded human, incredibly annoying of course, but human, the laughter did not. It sounded animalistic but not wild, more on the hysterical side, an uncontrollable note of madness that can't possibly belong to a human because it's senseless, it's rawly incoherent, strained to the point of resembling a... hyena.  
Merlin's breath caught in his throat as the voice abruptly stopped laughing.  
"I'm not a sorcerer."  
Merlin took a deep breath to steady his voice.  
"I know."  
Because suddenly, he did. He couldn't see because the pieces were scattered everywhere, but the laughter snapped them back into place.  
That explained why he turned young again. Well, not quite, but he could build hypotheses. The reason that triggered it all was that magic had began to separate from him, he could feel it, a tiny sprinkle of a part of him animating another being. It was only the beginning and he knew it.  
Maybe magic needed him to be able to take a step without his spine snapping in two? Or maybe he was mortal again? Was that some sort of incentive?  
He didn't know, couldn't know.  
What he knew was that now there was a Leucrota on the loose, something belonging inherently to the deepest parts of magic, and he was as thrilled as terrified of what the implications could be.  
The Leucrota was a creature that he personally found repulsive, to the point of giving him goosebumps. Not because it was particularly bad or anything, it was just really, really ugly. It had the chest and legs of a lion, the hindquarters of a stag and the face of a horse, but with the creepiest of mouths, that went from ear to ear, and he had a single bone where the row of teeth should have been. Also yes, he could imitate human voice, and he was happy to know he wasn't completely nuts. Though it could imitate it, though, it couldn't do anything for his laughter, because it was part hyena too, he figured, or however the thing was, its laughter was really characteristic, and that's what snapped recognition in him.  
He would have gladly looked for and taken care of it. He longed for some adventure, he actually had been starving for it, also the thing was known for hurting people without being threatened, and it was dangerous to let live. Thing is, there were three factors refraining him from it: point one, it was a magical creature. There was a connection between them, whether he liked it or not, and it was significantly increased due to the fact that it was the only one apart from him, and that meant that, until there were just the two of them, he could hear it. It wasn't with every creature, because the connection manifested himself in different ways, but this was it for them, and that meant that he had no idea where the creature was. The odds were it was somewhere in India, with it being its origin country and everything.  
Point two, he felt sort of bad going on a hunting spree and killing the first and momentarily only other thing that shared the core of his being.  
Point three, he would have done anything in his world to not have that head hanging on top of his fireplace. 

~~~

He needed some booze.  
He had just finished teaching an animal the basics of human morality and arguing with it on the distinction between 'survival necessity' and 'recreational murder', which happened right after the discovery of magic having awoken, which wasn't really puff pastry and cheesecakes like the ones he had at Sally's shop that afternoon, in between a feverish research and the other. It was 7 p.m. and he needed some booze. And possibly a Christmas cookies scented Yankee Candle, and damn it all. He was tired, it had been one day, and it was already enough stress for the succeeding millennium.  
He wanted to soak himself in a fog of artificial pastry-sweet scent induced, alcohol fueled semi hallucinations, and pass out drooling on his forearm.  
He was standing in front of the liquor shelf in the minuscule, decrepit little store of a gas station near the lake, because paradoxically it was the only one equipped with Yankee Candles, sniffing absentmindedly his candle, wondering whether to grab one or two bottles of vodka.  
Maybe he'd shot for three, he figured, to test if his immortality had been undermined or not.  
The door squeaked open, swallowing a weird smell of algae. It was probably one of the homeless people living near the lake, he figured, because they were the only ones going there as much as he did.  
He heard heavy, noisy, weird-sounding steps getting closer, and he turned around, still sniffing the candle, to see a pair of armored feet right in front of him.  
"Oh, thank god. What is a Game of Thrones and why do I look like I've just come out of one?".  
The candle crashed down with an explosion of glass.


End file.
